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Controlling Development: Certainty and Discretion in Europe, the USA and Hong Kong
Philip Booth
London, UCL Press, 1996,168 pp., L14.95, ISBN 1-85728-585-9
This book represents a welcome contribution to UCL Press's rapidly expanding Natural and Built Environment Series. The main concern of this particular text is to provide an account of the continuing evolution of systems for making decisions regarding development.
Booth's departure point for this project is that two types of development control system have emerged; first, systems such as that of the UK which adopt a 'discretionary' approach to decision making over development proposals; and second, systems such as the French case, where a more regulatory approach is widely held to provide a more certain, less flexible, system of control. Most of the discussion revolves around the UK and French systems although additional material is presented on Hong Kong and literature relating to some other European states and the USA is mobilized, "to deal with particular issues [to] which these systems give rise" (p. 67).
The book then has two central concerns:
with certainty and flexibility in development-control decision making and the discretion afforded to decision-makers;
with power. As a result of the discretion afforded and the accountability built into systems,...